John Saul (27 page)

Now, though, as he moved through the darkness, he could hear something else moving, too.

Off to the right he could make out a faint rustling sound, a sound that stopped abruptly just a split second after he himself stopped moving. When he set out again, the same soft rustling drifted once more through the trees.

From the left, up the hill, he heard a soft sound, almost like a whistle.

A bird?

Perhaps a man …

Sikes froze, listening.

The rustling sound didn’t stop this time, but grew nearer.

An animal, stalking him, moving closer and closer.

He switched on the flashlight, playing its weak beam through the tree trunks, finally holding it on a clump of brush ten yards away.

A clump of brush large enough, and thick enough, to conceal even the great bulk of a grizzly.

The rustling stopped as Sikes trained the light on the brush. He’d discovered his stalker.

Now the prey would become the hunter.

Silently dropping to his knees, he placed the flashlight on the ground, its beam, failing rapidly now, still focused on the mass of shrubbery. He raised the gun to his shoulder, gripped it firmly, and slowly pulled the trigger.

The attack came just as the gun fired.

As a roar of sound burst from the barrel and a load of heavy shot spewed from its muzzle, the gun flew out of Bill Sikes’s hands as something pounced on him from behind, its weight flattening him to the ground, the shotgun pressed beneath his body.

An instinctive scream rose inside him, cut off before a sound escaped his lips, for before the air in his lungs could pass his vocal cords, his larynx was torn from his throat, and the huge artery carrying blood from his heart to his brain was ripped to shreds.

Bill Sikes died without uttering his final scream of terror.

The single report echoed back and forth across the valley. Frank Peters reached down and unsnapped the leashes that held his two bloodhounds in check. Giving them one last whiff of the shirt MaryAnne had brought from Joey’s room, he spoke sharply to the pair of dogs. “Go get him! Go!” Baying with joy at being released from their constraints, the hounds raced ahead, quickly disappearing into the darkness. But as Peters, followed by Rick Martin, Tony Moleno, and Olivia Sherbourne—who had insisted on coming along despite Rick’s strongest arguments—continued climbing up the trail through the pine forest, he knew there was no chance of losing the hounds. As long as they were on the scent, they would keep baying. In the event they lost it, the tone of their howling would instantly change as they began ranging around, searching for the lost scent, never giving up until he caught up with them and reattached their leads to drag them away. Even if their quarry went into a river, the hounds would keep on, splashing back and forth through the water, searching both banks, dashing up and down the river, constantly searching.

A few minutes later the baying did, indeed, change its tone, but not to the note of frustration that Frank Peters anticipated. Rather, it was the excited bark the dogs emitted when they’d succeeded in tracking down, and treeing, their prey. “Let’s go,” he said, heaving his heavy frame into a trot. “They’ve got something!”

It took them nearly ten minutes to catch up with the dogs. When they finally did, what they found was not what
they were expecting. As Peters shined his flashlight on the object that had so completely distracted his dogs from their job, he stopped dead in his tracks, swearing softly. “Holy shit,” he breathed. “Look at that.”

Olivia Sherbourne, caught on the trail behind the three men, elbowed past them, terrified that she was about to see Joey Wilkenson’s corpse spread out on the ground.

She stared instead at the body of Bill Sikes, his heavy jacket ripped from the collar downward, the flesh of his back shredded, his head twisted at an odd angle, connected to his body only by a few ligaments and some torn muscle. Though she knew he was dead, still she dropped to her knees, automatically feeling his wrist for a pulse.

“What the hell could have done that?” Frank Peters whispered, eyes fastened on the body in frozen fascination as his dogs, finally abandoning their examination of the corpse, gathered around his legs, whimpering eagerly.

Rick Martin and Tony Moleno, though, already knew the answer.

The marks on Bill Sikes’s body were almost identical to the ones they’d seen on Glen Foster’s corpse only a couple of nights ago.

Whatever was roaming the mountains above Sugarloaf had just struck again.

“Okay,” Rick Martin sighed. “Here’s what we’re going to do. I don’t want anything touched until the guys from Boise can get up here tomorrow. I don’t want any footprints disturbed, I don’t want Sikes’s body moved—nothing. If there are any clues about what happened up here, I want them exactly in place tomorrow morning. Tony, how do you feel about staying up all night again?”

Moleno shrugged. “I survived the other night—guess I’ll make it through tonight, too.”

“Okay. Build a fire, and watch your ass.” He shifted his attention to Frank Peters. “Any chance of getting your dogs back on the scent?”

Peters spread his hands helplessly. “I can try, but I don’t know.” For the next twenty minutes, he led the dogs around the perimeter of the area where Bill Sikes had been found, staying well away from the body itself, partly to keep the
hounds from being distracted by the fresh blood, partly to avoid disturbing the killing ground.

But the hounds failed to pick up Joey Wilkenson’s scent. It was as if he’d simply vanished into the blackness of the night.

T
he light of the rising sun crept down the rugged slopes of the mountains, diffused by the leaden sky so that the slow shift from the blackness of night to the gray of morning seemed to have no source at all. Slowly, out of the darkness emerged the ghostly forms of the great jutting cliffs and the towering trees that flowed down from the timberline to the valley below.

Joey Wilkenson, sleep finally beginning to release him from its tight embrace, snuggled deeper into the bed, fighting off the slow wakening of his mind and body. As the cold of the morning seeped into his body, he closed his fingers on the covers to draw them closer around him. But something was wrong—instead of the soft down of his familiar comforter, he felt something rough in his fingers. He came instantly awake; his eyes blinked open. He was lying on his side, and the first thing he saw was a window.

A window with no glass in its empty frame.

A window that shouldn’t be there, for in his room at home, he could see no window when he was lying on his left side. His pulse quickened as he suddenly realized the bed in which he’d slept was not his own. Every muscle in his body ached, not just from the cold—which seemed to penetrate deeper within his very bones with each passing second, but from an unaccustomed stiffness, as well. Joey sat up, and the animal hide with which he had been covered fell away, leaving him shivering as the cold wind from the window struck his naked chest.

Where was he?

Why wasn’t he at home?

He tried to remember what had happened last night. It began to come back to him in bits and pieces

The feeling had come over him last night.

The terrible nervous feeling.

The urge to run out into the night.

The voice he’d heard calling out to him, whispering his name.

He’d tried to shut it out. But the harder he tried not to hear it, the more persistent the voice became.

He’d started wondering if this time he was actually going to go crazy, and that thought had scared him even more than the terrifying things happening to his mind and his body.

What if it never went away this time?

What if he had to spend the rest of his life feeling like this?

They’d lock him up. They’d put him in a hospital with all the crazy people, and never let him out again.

His emotions had fed on each other then, and he could feel himself sinking into a dark pit with a monster waiting for him at the bottom—a terrifying monster, which would suddenly attack him, coming out of nowhere, twisting its tentacles around him like a choking vine from which there would be no escape.

Finally the whole turmoil in his mind had congealed into rage, and he yelled at Aunt MaryAnne when she came looking for him.

No! He hadn’t yelled at Aunt MaryAnne at all. It had been Alison who had come to his room, not Aunt MaryAnne!

His memory was getting fuzzy again, and he had to struggle to remember it all. Alison had come to his room. Why? And why had he been so mad at her?

He tried to remember what she’d said to him, but his mind failed him. But he did remember lying on the bed, staring at her, hating her.…

Hating
Alison
?

But that was crazy! He didn’t hate Alison. He
liked
her. In fact, he liked her more than anyone he’d ever met. Yesterday morning, when she’d taken his hand, he felt wonderful,
as if no matter what anyone said about him or how they treated him, it would be all right as long as Alison was next to him, holding his hand.

And then last night he’d said things to her—terrible things—things about her mother, and even about her. Snatches of it came back to him now.

 … wish you’d go away … wish you’d all go away … hate … all of you!

He’d gotten off the bed, and he’d—

Oh, Jesus! He’d attacked Alison!

Except he hadn’t! Not really! He wouldn’t have!

But as he sat on the hard bed in the icy room, he knew that he had. He’d run at her, to put his hands around her neck and squeeze.

And keep squeezing.

But why? She hadn’t done anything to him! She’d just been trying to talk to him, to find out what was wrong, to help him!

And he’d tried to kill her!

But she’d gotten away from him! He shoved her, and she fell against the wall, and—

All he remembered was a terrible searing pain, and then he’d been outside, running. Storm had been with him, and it had been very dark, and yet despite the blackness of the night, he’d been able to see.

See almost as clearly as if it was daytime.

Yet his memory after he’d left the house was nothing more than flickering images, images he could barely grasp before they flitted away again, skittering out of his reach before he could quite examine them.

Where was he? Wrapping the animal skin around himself, he went to the open door and peered out. He frowned. The clearing looked familiar, and when he finally went outside and turned to look at the crumbling cabin in which he’d passed the night, he had the certain feeling that he’d been here before.

When?

He went back into the cabin, his mind puzzling at the question, and suddenly he knew.

Day before yesterday.

Tuesday afternoon, when he had gone up to Coyote Creek Campground with Alison and Logan. Storm had smelled something, and gone off after it, and he followed. It hadn’t seemed like they’d been gone very long, but when he got home it was a lot later than he thought it should have been.

Was this where he’d come? He gazed curiously around the cabin, stared at the single chair that stood next to a rough-surfaced table made of curling pine planks. There was an ancient cast-iron stove with a large kettle on it, a counter on which there were some badly chipped plates and mugs, and a few worn-looking clothes hanging from rusty nails hammered into the walls. So someone lived here, even if there wasn’t any glass in the windows and the door barely shut. He looked at the windows once again, and discovered that there were shutters on the outside, shutters that could be pulled closed, and bolted. Once he’d secured them, he went to the stove, found the remnants of a barely smoldering fire, and added three pieces of wood to it from the box against the wall.

Under the counter, there was a lantern, an old kerosene one, but its wick was trimmed and its chimney clean. Yet if someone lived here, where was he?

And where was Storm?

He went to the door once more, whistled, and a moment later Storm appeared, slinking out of the underbrush, only to stop when he was still ten yards away from the cabin, dropping nervously to his haunches.

Joey frowned at the dog’s behavior, then called out to him. “Come on, Storm! It’s okay, boy!” The dog didn’t move, but only whimpered anxiously. “Storm, come!” Joey commanded.

Still the dog didn’t move from where he sat, but his body stiffened and he began quivering with nervousness. Scowling at the shepherd, Joey turned away, went back into the cabin, and set about searching for his clothes.

He finally found them, piled in the corner of the cabin’s single room, and picked them up.

A strange, sharp odor filled his nose, and he carried the
clothing to the bed, puzzled. Only when he shook them out did he understand.

Everywhere, dark stains covered his clothes.

Bloodstains.

Still wet, still sticky.

Where had they come from?

Had he done something? Something he couldn’t even remember? He must have! If he hadn’t, why were his clothes stained? Seizing them, he hurried to the stove where the wood he’d added had begun to sprout flames, and stuffed the clothing inside, slamming the door shut as soon as the bloodied material began to singe.

Terrified by the thoughts that now swirled through his mind, his eyes darted frantically around the cabin like those of a trapped animal. He had to get out! Get out now!

Shoving his bare feet into the pair of shoes that sat on the floor next to the bed, but with nothing to protect him from the cold of the morning except the animal skin beneath which he’d slept, he fled out the front door, Storm finally leaving his post to dash after him as he started down the trail. The horrible knowledge of what he must have done during the night building in his mind, yet having no clear memory at all of actually having done it, Joey charged down the mountainside, slipping and sliding on the stony trail, one hand holding the fur blanket around his naked shoulders as he used the other one to steady himself when he lost his footing. As he came into the forest and the path leveled out, he slowed. The cabin was now well out of sight. But what if someone found him up here? He left the trail, moving off into the shelter of the woods, then paralleled it, keeping his tread light.